Yes, that’s my reading also. It’s sure what I’d do in her situation.

Meanwhile, she’s still there in the CFO seat, which is probably a very uncomfortable place to be at the present time.

From his bio, I’d guess that Mr. Lightfoot is in that category, but does anybody here know if that’s actually true?

I was researching her CFO tenure a little and came across the following snippet from last August. Whether it has any current relevance, I could not say.

http://aviationweek.com/space/garver-quits-nasa-alpa

Garver Quits NASA For ALPA
Aug 6, 2013 Frank Morring, Jr.

[snip]

Garver’s departure will come on the heels of Elizabeth Robinson, the agency’s chief financial officer, who has been named under secretary of energy. Robinson and Garver were staunch allies in the often-heated management policy debates that pitted them against more traditional NASA managers, including Administrator Charles Bolden.

As to all the other touch labor that doubtless goes into the stratospheric costs of SLS components, I’m sure you’re also right. The aerospace industry has not, in general, been a big user of industrial robotics. They’re happy enough to carve their parts with state-of-the-art CNC machine tools, but after that, the process of aircraft construction would look familiar to anyone on the Rouge Plant line in 1908. Spacecraft production “lines” are even worse.

In contrast, I strongly suspect that one of Elon’s secret weapons in keeping costs below what anyone in the legacy aerospace world thinks possible is aggressive automation. I don’t know how SpaceX assembles Merlin 1-D’s, for example, but I know Elon employs industrial engineers at Tesla who have developed one of the most highly automated robotic car assembly lines in the world. I’d be amazed if these same guys haven’t been splitting their time between Tesla and SpaceX. A Merlin 1-D is a lot smaller, lighter and more conveniently shaped for automated assembly than a Tesla Model S, for example.

Another clue. Much of Tesla is Bay Area located, but there’s a biggish building with the Tesla logo on it right next to the even bigger-ish SpaceX headquarters and factory building in Hawthorne. I don’t know what goes on in that Hawthorne Tesla building, but maybe it’s where the industrial engineers prototype their automation systems. The ones for Tesla go north and the ones for SpaceX go next door. That would certainly explain a lot.

As supporting evidence for this surmise, I am particularly struck by the quite modest difference between the price of a commercial Falcon 9 satellite launch quoted on SpacceX’s web site ($61.2 milllion) and the price quoted for a Falcon Heavy launch ($85 million). There is cross-feed plumbing to account for, to be sure, but an FH is, to a good first-order approximation, just three F9 first stages strapped together. The FH price suggests the incremental price of an F9-type core is less than $12 million. The engines are supposed to account for about 75% of that, so that would be $9 million. As there are nine engines per core, that makes the fully-burdened price of a Merlin 1-D, as it reaches the customer, right around a million bucks. If this is even close to being true it has to be because SpaceX has automated the pluperfect hell out of Merlin 1-D assembly.

I was using the heat shield as an illustration of how this happens using a related program.

I am quite certain that behind the curtain SLS is the same….

– Different structures, hand made, for each vehicle.
– Elaborate hand work.
– Elaborate analysis and management of individual parts.
– Elaborate efforts to automate said hand work in x number of ways.
– Lots of tests, experiments and side projects to try things out that will never be used.

It is about finding work for all the idle hands.